Infonautics was an information services company, founded in 1992 by Marvin Weinberger, Lawrence Husick, and

Josh Kopelman Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. Kopelman is best known as a founder of First Round Capital, a pioneering seed-stage venture fund that led the seed round in Uber. Josh has consistently been ran ...

, and had its headquarters in

Wayne, Pennsylvania Wayne is an unincorporated community centered in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, on the Main Line, a series of highly affluent Philadelphia suburbs located along the railroad tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad and one of the wealthiest areas ...

, United States. It was a spin-out from Telebase, Inc., which retained a minority position in the company. The company's executives included Van Morris (CEO), Ram Mohan (COO/CTO), Frederica O'Brien (CFO), and Gerard Lewis (General Counsel).

History

In 1990, Telebase founder Weinberger and outside counsel Husick conceived of Homework Helper, a $10 per month unlimited research service having a large multimedia database and a natural language user interface. Working with Brewster Kahle, a protocol was developed to run on the

Thinking Machines Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachuset ...

massively parallel computer system, but in late early 1991, Conquest Software demonstrated its semantic search engine and a change in direction ensued. Hardware support was provided by Tandem Computers. Early work on the multimedia database system yielded multiple US patents. In 1996, the company was listed on the

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

stock exchange. It was

delisted In corporate finance, a listing refers to the company's shares being on the list (or board) of stock that are officially traded on a stock exchange. Some stock exchanges allow shares of a foreign company to be listed and may allow dual listing, sub ...

in 2001. In 2001,

Tucows Tucows Inc. is an American-Canadian publicly traded Internet services and telecommunications company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and incorporated in Pennsylvania, United States. The company is composed of three independent business ...

acquired Infonautics through a business tactic called "

reverse takeover A reverse takeover (RTO), reverse merger, or reverse IPO is the acquisition of a public company by a private company so that the private company can bypass the lengthy and complex process of going public. Sometimes, conversely, the public compan ...

". Initially, Infonautics purchased Tucows and then changed its own name to Tucows.Paula J. Hane
"Tucows Sells Two Former Infonautics Services"
''Information Today'', August 26, 2002. On August 26, 2002, Tucows sold eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com to

HighBeam Research HighBeam Research was a paid search engine and full text online archive owned by Gale, a subsidiary of Cengage, for thousands of newspapers, magazines, academic journals, newswires, trade magazines, and encyclopedias in English. It was headquar ...

. The company created online services ''Homework Helper'' on

Prodigy Prodigy, Prodigies or The Prodigy may refer to: * Child prodigy, a child who produces meaningful output to the level of an adult expert performer ** Chess prodigy, a child who can beat experienced adult players at chess Arts, entertainment, and ...

, ''Encyclopedia.com'', ''Electric Library'', and ''CompanySleuth''.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'' is a daily newspaper headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The newspaper's circulation is the largest in both the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley metropolitan region of Southeastern Pennsy ...

noted the company was "one of the first Internet companies in the Philadelphia area"

References

Technology companies established in 1992 Business intelligence companies 1992 establishments in Pennsylvania 2001 disestablishments in Pennsylvania Defunct companies based in Pennsylvania Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Tucows {{US-internet-company-stub